It was a wonder the neighbors didn't complain. And I know it's irrational, maybe even paranoid, but I imagined the old guy upstairs must have heard me crying lately and was mocking my ... [+]
Kenneth N. Margolin is a retired attorney, and lives with his wife, Judith, in Newton, Massachusetts. Still relatively new to fiction, Ken's stories have been published in print and online, in Short Edition, Evening Street Review, Twenty-Two Twenty-Eight, among others; poetry in Shot Glass Journal. "Tiger, Oh Tiger" was selected Juried Runner-up for creative nonfiction in Short Edition's America: color it in Contest, summer 2020.
The black man who approached from the rear of the gathering at my father's burial looked to be one hundred years old. He was frail, but not bent. He walked haltingly, supported by two black teenagers, one on either side of him. As my family members and my father's friends watched, puzzled, the man and his young escorts continued around the edge of the group of mourners toward my father's casket that lay beside the dug hole and the cemetery workers ready to lower it into the ground. Through my grief-fogged brain, I saw a much younger face superimposed over the face of the old man so determined